Perfect Stranger

By Mikayla Bean

Working in healthcare is one of the most intense jobs in the world. I wish I could say that I was aware of this fact going into Radiology School, but alas, I did not. Nothing really prepares you for what you can experience in the field.

Fast-forward two and a half years after school and I’ve pretty much got the job down. Easy patients, hard patients, young, old, etc. It didn’t matter; I felt like I could handle any of it.  Like any other day, I walked into work ready to try and help the people I would encounter. The Emergency Room is a bustling world all on its own, cut off from what the real world is like outside by the four lead-lined walls.

I see people in all stages of life: sick, in pain, old, young, or just looking to find a place to stay for the night. I felt immune to the different levels and stages of ailments and diagnoses. I could already tell who would live and go home, who would be hanging out in the hospital for hours on end, and those who didn’t have a hope of being in this world another hour. It was predictive from my point of view, however close or far away that was. The ER is a place where sick people die and that’s just the way it is.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the perfect stranger, an outpatient, who I would meet later that day.

Jack was an older man, maybe late sixties, with nothing that really made him stick out of the sea of patients I would do during my shift. He had a lung biopsy done and was found to have the late stages of lung cancer.  I met Jack after his outpatient biopsy, taking an x-ray to make sure his lung wasn’t collapsed. Part of the procedure, nothing exciting. He was very nice, joking, asking me if he would glow after this x-ray. I laughed and jokingly told him that maybe after the next couple he might. I hoped I wouldn’t see him again, but he had a small amount of air between his lung and chest wall, a pneumothorax, that would need monitoring, so Jack the Outpatient became Jack the Inpatient.  He was to have the same x-ray every two hours to monitor the pneumothorax, so I ended up seeing Jack a few more times that night as he sat and waited for a room in the hospital.

I returned to work the next day with my first task being to go and take Jack’s bi-hourly x-ray. I drove my x-ray machine upstairs, bouncing along, in a good mood and hoping that it would rub off on those who were sick, in pain, or grieving. Hoping to make someone feel like they weren’t surrounded by sadness. I knocked on the door and announced myself. Jack was sitting in bed, eating what looked like to be a piece of meatloaf: hospital style. He smiled when he saw me, but I could tell he wasn’t feeling the best. His wife was sitting in the chair by the window, keeping her husband company. I had her leave as I took the x-ray. While collecting my things, I asked Jack if he was getting enough rest.

“Yes, I had a pretty good night’s sleep last night. Thank you for asking.”

I smiled and told him that it was nice to hear because hospitals are anything but quiet with nurses and other staff members coming in for testing and vitals when all the patient really needs is to rest and heal. I told him to enjoy his dinner and that I would see him again in another two hours.

Little did I know it would be less than one hour.

I was sitting in the x-ray general area, on my phone as I waited for the next x-ray to be ordered. That’s when I heard it over the intercom system: “Code Blue, room 2130. Code Blue, room 2130. Code Blue, room 2130.”

Jack’s Room.

I jumped up and grabbed the portable x-ray machine to be there if the doctors needed an image of anything that might help Jack. When I arrived, compressions were already well underway. Jack’s skin was already an ashy color.  I told my coworker who was standing next to me that I didn’t know what was happening, I saw Jack less than an hour ago and he was fine. How did a procedure that happens almost every day lead to this?

After an hour of tubes, flying hands, and compressions, Jack still wasn’t fine.

 He didn’t make it.

 I heard the doctor call time of death as nurses and other hospital staff flowed out of the room like a class being dismissed after the bell. Jack’s wife was in the back corner of his room, trying to get out of the way during the commotion, but was now sitting in shock, unable to grasp that her husband was gone.

I sat down in a chair outside his room, still shocked that the man I had seen for two days was suddenly dead.

It just didn’t make sense. He was joking and smiling yesterday and today.

What happened?

Later that night, I sobbed into my fiancé’s chest over the perfect stranger I had known only for a couple of days. Jack reminded me that you never know what the next year, week, or even minute can bring. I had always heard that life was too short, but I didn’t understand how true it was until Jack.